A silent hunger epidemic has been raging through India. A new report by the International Food Policy Research Institute — a think-tank and research group that focuses on reducing hunger and malnutrition — has ranked India 100 out of 119 countries. Adding to India’s discomfit is the fact that on the global hunger index, India lags behind the likes of North Korea, Bangladesh and even the war-torn Iraq. It is of little consolation that India managed to fare better than Pakistan and Afghanistan — two countries that are infamous throughout the world for their politically unstable regimes and for the easy acceptance and clout of extremist forces.

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India, unlike Afghanistan and Pakistan, still lays a claim to being the world’s strongest and largest democracy. Largest democracy it may be, but the claim to being the strongest rings hollow given that a democratic experiment that has fructified in lakhs of children sleeping with a hungry stomach cannot be treated as anything other than an abject failure. As per the report, more than a fifth of Indian children aged under five weighed far less than the accepted standard, and a third of them had not achieved the height, normal for peers of their age. Only three other countries, of which two are African countries with a history of civil war and armed resistance, have had the shameful qualifier of having more than 20 per cent of their children ‘wasting’ away between 2012-2016.

If our macroeconomic firmament and our financial superstructure fails to reach the bottom of the pyramid, then whatever progress we attain risks being labelled as cosmetic and miles away from the spirit of integrated development that PM Modi has been working towards. It needs a mention here that the Niti Aayog is conscious of this scourge and has drafted a national nutrition strategy. The report by the thinktank to the government makes for a chilling read. Consider, for instance, that maternal and child undernutrition accounts for a deplorable 45 per cent of the mortality of children under five years. The knotty problem of child undernutrition  is deeply inter-linked with women not receiving the right amount of nutrition during and after their pregnancy. The anaemia level in women, as per the National Family Health Survey-4, continues to be as high as 53 per cent. Couple the intractable issue of malnutrition with the sub-par maternal care, and the rising number of neo-natal mortalities in backward states seems only natural.

Sadly, Indian states have been lagging behind when it comes confronting this challenge. Going by the current rate of decline in stunting of children, experts suggest that India will be able to reach the lower stunting levels of China by 2055. This situation is compounded by the fact that across states there is a variation in target setting when it comes to reducing the nutrition deficit in children. For real change to occur, all state finance ministers will have to realign their budgets in a manner that lays greater emphasis on higher allocations to social development schemes.